OAKLAND — A sea of gray heads clad in floppy hats and visors filled Lakeside Park on Sunday afternoon, awaiting the first strains of the “National Emblem” march from the Oakland Municipal Band.

As the band began to play, the crowd clambered to its feet — some with the aid of friends or walkers — eager for a two-hour excursion into their youn-

ger years.

“I like the marches and this kind of music. I sing along!” says Josephine Hatton, 85, who has been attending the band’s shows with her niece and daughter for about 20 years. “It’s stuff from my past.”

During the group’s heyday in the 1920s, Oakland Municipal Band concerts drew thousands, often more than the 4,000-seat venue could handle. It played year-round and regularly received funding from the city and corporations such as Clorox and Kaiser.

But Sunday’s show peaked with an audience of around 300 people, mostly composed of older fans like Hatton who have attended the shows for years.

When the city fell on hard times after the passage of Proposition 13 and corporations either moved out of Oakland or moved on to more pressing causes such as homelessness, the town band basically got left behind.

“The band was the biggest entertainment in town, if you can believe that,” says band director Dwight Hall. “Well, times change.”

The band is down to six summer concerts a year, one every Sunday through Aug. 8, sponsored mainly by private donations. It may not even have enough money to finish this year’s round of shows — its 93rd season, said Anne Woodell, chairwoman of the Friends of the Oakland Municipal Band, an organization devoted to finding funds for the band to keep playing.

Money is not the only problem the aging band is facing, in the era of television, Internet and PlayStations. As its core audience continues to grow older, the band is having trouble striking a chord with younger generations.

Hatton and her daughter and niece say they recognized all the songs played Sunday from their high school years, when they performed in their own school bands.

But school bands today are not what they were, says Norma Hatton, 61. What once took its place next to the football team in terms of prestige and practice time is now relegated to a once-a-week practice in a school basement, if a school band still exists at all.

“With recording and the rock and hip-hop and the rap and stuff … the kids don’t have exposure to this,” Hall says. “They replace it with their own age-level music.”

Under Hall’s direction, the band is trying to adjust to cater to younger audiences, incorporating arrangements from Broadway tunes from “Phantom of the Opera” and Disney movies like “Mary Poppins.” They’re experimenting with different types of music, such as latin music, and they’re dropping the old chestnuts like Tchaikovsky’s “1812 Overture,” favored by previous band director Fred Rose, at the request of audience members who say those songs are too long.

The band’s future may ultimately depend on grandparents like Sharon Rutherford, 54, who was at nearby Children’s Fairyland with her daughter and grandchildren when she decided to bring them over to the band’s performance. She wanted to expose them to some patriotic music on Independence Day.

Along with older residents, Sunday’s event also played host to a smattering of fidgety children, who danced to the Disney music and paraded around the bandstand waving their flags during the closing number, “Stars and Stripes Forever.”serE

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